Abstract-In the last few decades word association research has provided precise insight into the development and organization of the mental lexicon; however, there is still sufficient ground for more exploration to gain a better understanding of how L2 learners' mental lexicon might be organized and how word association behavior may vary according to L2 proficiency level. This paper was intended to investigate the development of mental lexicon through a psycholinguistic experiment and more specifically, to explore Index Terms-mental lexicon, language proficiency, word association behavior, syntagmatic relation, paradigmatic relation

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Although research studies on methodological issues of English for General Purposes are abundant in the literature, they are still one of the less explored areas of research in English for Academic Purposes, especially with respect to teachers’ cognitions and practices. Also, lack of collaboration between ELT instructors and content teachers in teaching discipline-based EAP courses has resulted in noticeable inconsistencies in the two groups’ instructions. The present study was an extension of Atai and Fatahi-Majd (2014) and explored the cognitions and practices within and across six Iranian ELT instructors and six content teachers regarding their translation-based, form focused, feedback and vocabulary teaching activities. Each participant was observed for six sessions. Field note taking and semi-structured interviews were also done with the two groups of teachers so as to delve into the cognitions underlying their actual practices. The general findings supported Atai and Fatahi (2014) in all the areas under investigation where there were within group inconsistences and across-group discrepancies within and between the two groups of teachers respectively with content teachers being much more inconsistent than ELT instructors in terms of their practices and cognitions. The findings of the study have implications for renewing the current practices of ELT instructors and content teachers teaching discipline-based EAP courses worldwide.

Abstract-The present study sought to investigate the extent to which discipline specificity of the occurrence of metadiscourse (MD) elements had been taken into account in developing ESP textbooks in Iran. To do so, three distinct disciplines, namely, psychology, medicine, and mechanical engineering were chosen for investigation. For each discipline, two textbooks were analyzed; one content book, and one ESP textbook developed for students in the Iranian academic context. To analyze the six textbooks, Hyland's (2005) taxonomy of MD markers was adopted. The occurrence and frequency of each type of MD marker in the corpus were then identified and counted by a computational software (Anticon 2.3). The obtained results were further analyzed through SPSS (18) to see if the differences between the frequencies of different types of MD elements in the three disciplines and two textbook types in each discipline were statistically significant. Regarding variations across the disciplines, the results showed that MD markers were used in medicine and psychology texts the most and in mechanical engineering ones the least. As to the differences between content textbooks and ESP ones, the results indicated that MD markers occur significantly fewer in the ESP textbooks than in the content ones in all three disciplines. This may have some implications for ESP material developers to incorporate the metadiscoursal aspects of English in general and those of each discipline in particular into the ESP textbooks.Index Terms-content books, ESP textbooks, interactional metadiscoursal markers, interactive metadiscoursal markers, materials evaluation